If I may offer an anecdote, the output stage in my guitar amplifier is powered by a GEC tube that is now 55 years old. It sounds great. When I found the tube, it had been rolling around for a couple of decades at the bottom of a wooden box.
This could simply be survivorship bias, but it does appear that back in the day, they knew how to build these things to last.
> What you’re seeing there, isn’t a giant sticker being applied.
I thought it worth mentioning that stickers were in the mix too. In the town I grew up in, there was a printing company that made them for Atari. I recall being brought to a "local industry expo" event as a kid, and I have a vivid memory of seeing heavy-duty vinyl (?) stickers for "Pole Position" at this company's stand. They would have been designed to be applied to the marquees and control panels of the upright cabinet.
As objets d'art. The thinking is that owning (and crucially, displaying) vinyl records marks you out as being more discerning than the rest of the herd.
I've heard a lot of vox pops in recent years on the subject of why young couples where I live are not starting families, and by far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable. It's not a yearning for hedonism that's dissuading them, it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
I just want to add that I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I would hate for anyone who's losing their hair to conclude that it's the end of the road for their love life.
Good grooming, a good sense of humor, and most importantly, generally being a good person, are what really matter.
Good for you. I always did notice if there was a spark between me and someone I encountered. I wasn't going to act on it if I was already in a relationship, but I found it nice to feel that I had some physical appeal.
> baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers
Just a guess, and I highly doubt there are any reliable statistics on this, but perhaps balding men are less likely to be tempted to abandon their family unit, thereby making it more likely that their children will thrive and carry on their genes?
I base this theory on my own experience, which is that I went completely bald in my early thirties and haven't had a second look from a woman ever since. Even if I were the sort to want to cheat on my wife, there wouldn't be any takers![0]
[0] I'm not claiming that bald men are necessarily sexually unattractive. I just know that it didn't work for me, looks-wise.
It's amusing to see comments implying that the TB-303 is some kind of neglected classic. In reality, it can only be considered to have been forgotten for perhaps the two years after Roland ended production in 1984.
"Acid Tracks" came out in 1987 and I genuinely feel like I've been reading endlessly about the 303 ever since.
Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.
As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.
Sure, I get that. I was just aiming for comic effect in pointing out that the player's initial reward for having made it through all the levels of a very difficult game is "lol, do it again".
I did work my way through it a second time to see the "proper ending", and what's interesting is that I remember nothing about it. There's a moral in there, somewhere.
Okay, that's interesting. I was in my early teens when it was released. Absolutely everyone I knew had either a Spectrum or a C64, aside from the one rich kid who owned a BBC Micro.
I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."
As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.
But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."
I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.
But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.
Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.
You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.
On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.
If I may offer an anecdote, the output stage in my guitar amplifier is powered by a GEC tube that is now 55 years old. It sounds great. When I found the tube, it had been rolling around for a couple of decades at the bottom of a wooden box.
This could simply be survivorship bias, but it does appear that back in the day, they knew how to build these things to last.